According to the pundits, the US election is still on a knife edge.
As the clock ticks steadily towards its rendez vous with electoral fate on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, nobody feels able to predict the outcome. Yet there is one way to reliably predict who will win – which is not to look at all 50 US states - but only at one state in particular: Pennsylvania. Because historically speaking, whoever wins here also takes the White House.
In fact, the last time a Democrat won the White House WITHOUT winning Pennsylvania was way back in 1948. That was the year that Harry Truman walloped Thomas Dewey.
Why Pennsylvania is such a good barometer is not hard to see, because it is a microcosm of the US as a whole – demographically, economically and politically.
It is a former manufacturing state that is transitioning to newer industries and businesses, but still has a large energy sector because of its abundant oil shale deposits.
The majority of the population is white, but there are growing immigrant communities. Some areas, like Allentown – the working-class factory city made famous by a Billy Joel song – are now majority Hispanic. The state's Black population, at 12%, is in line with the national averages.
If the state's two large urban areas, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, heavily favour the Democrats and suburbs that once were reliably conservative now tilt left, between the two cities stretch vast acres of rural territory where Republicans dominate. Agriculture is the second-largest industry in the state.
Recent elections have been tight. President Joe Biden won the state by about 80,000 votes in 2020 for the Democrats, but Donald Trump carried it for the Republicans by about 40,000 in his surprise 2016 win over Hillary Clinton.
It's not for nothing that this year both campaigns are spending more in Pennsylvania than any other state: $100m on political ads by the Democrat campaign and only slightly less for the Republicans.
It was not by chance that Harris introduced her running mate pick, Tim Walz, at a rally in Philadelphia. Nor that she spent the days preparing for her presidential debate in Pittsburgh where she went on to make a keynote economic speech two weeks ago.
Trump, for his part, has been in the city of Butler, named after a Civil War general and the place where he was nearly assassinated at a rally in July. It was a triumphant return, with much fanfare and multiple turns and speakers, including JD Vance and a goofy-looking Elon Musk in a "dark" MAGA cap. Shortly after, Trump even visited Joe Biden's hometown of Scranton, a typically brash strategy intended to show "strength" and to intimidate his opponents.
Yet if Pennsylvania holds the keys to the White House, then the fact is that the Democrats gambled away one big advantage, when they passed over Josh Shapiro - the popular current governor of the state as well as a dynamic speaker – in favour of Tim Walz as their VP pick.
Walz has made a particular effort to highlight Democrat's support for Israel, even as polls commissioned by Americans for Justice in Palestine, found that a quarter of voters said they were less likely to vote for the Democrats because of the party's support for Israel's murderous war in Gaza – a war currently under investigation by the United Nations as a "plausible genocide". The credibility of the poll is suspect, given who paid for it, but the fact that it showed Pennsylvania's voters were even more angry about the issue than those of Michigan, with its much higher proportion of Arab Americans, should have sounded warning bells for Walz and Harris.
Nonetheless, there are glimmers of hope for the Democrats. At least in theory, Harris being black should help them hold on to support among the states' young black men, a constituency that the Trump campaign had previously targeted - and with some success. Yet, so far, polls have shown Harris having limited success in convincing them to choose her over Trump.
For British readers, November 5 is an ominous date. Known as "Bonfire Night" there, it records Guy Fawkes' thwarted effort to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Likewise, today, both sides in the US election warn that if they lose, it will be the end of American democracy. Hyperbole? Yet as far as Trump goes, it seems a real possibility. Here is a politician who after the last election led a march on the nation's political capital that left five people dead.
Curious to say, not only does the fate of Pennsylvania pretty much decide the US election, but the fate of Pennsylvania itself is usually signalled by just one county within it: Northampton County, Three quarters white and heavily reliant on heavy industries, on the surface, Northampton does not augur well for Kamala. And yet the key to the county, as Representative Paul McHale told the Leigh Valley Live, is moderation.
"To succeed in the valley, you have to be fairly moderate", he said. "If you went down an ideological path, you were probably setting yourself up for defeat. If a party is set on winning, going to the middle is the recipe for this part of Pennsylvania."
Whether you love Trump or you hate him, moderation is not his strong suit. And so, if this is the real message from this tiny corner of Pennsylvania… the Democrats still have a chance. But it is a desperately slim one.
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